December 30, 2001

Many Say U.S. Planned for Terror but Failed to Take
Action

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

nside the White House situation room on the morning
terrorism transformed America, Franklin C. Miller, the director for
defense policy, was suddenly gripped by a staggering fear: "The White
House could be hit. We could be going down."

The reports and rumors came in a torrent: A car bomb had exploded at
the State Department. The Mall was in flames. The Pentagon had been
destroyed. Planes were bearing down on the capital.

The White House was evacuated, leaving the national security team
alone, trying to control a nation suddenly under siege and wondering if
they were next. Mr. Miller had an aide send out the names of those present
by e-mail "so that when and if we died, someone would know who was in
there."

Somewhere in the havoc of the moment, Richard A. Clarke, then the White
House counterterrorism chief, recalled the long drumbeat of warnings about
terrorists striking on American soil, many of them delivered and debated
in that very room. After a third hijacked jet had sliced into the
Pentagon, others heard Mr. Clarke say it first: "This is Al Qaeda."

An extensive review of the nation's antiterrorism efforts shows that
for years before Sept. 11, terror experts throughout the government
understood the apocalyptic designs of Osama bin Laden. But the top leaders
never reacted as if they believed the country was as vulnerable as it
proved to be that morning.

Dozens of interviews with current and former officials demonstrate that
even as the threat of terrorism mounted through eight years of the Clinton
administration and eight months of President Bush, the government did not
marshal its full forces against it.

The defensive work of tightening the borders and airport security was
studied but never quite completed. And though the White House undertook a
covert campaign to kill Mr. bin Laden, the government never mustered the
critical mass of political will and on-the-ground intelligence for the
kind of offensive against Al Qaeda it unleashed this fall.

The rising threat of the Islamic jihad movement was first detected by
United States investigators after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade
Center. The inquiry into that attack revealed a weakness in the
immigration system used by one of the terrorists, but that hole was never
plugged, and it was exploited by one of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

In 1996, a State Department dossier spelled out Mr. bin Laden's
operation and his anti-American intentions. And President Bill Clinton's
own pollster told him the public would rally behind a war on terrorism.
But none was declared.

By 1997, the threat of an Islamic attack on America was so well
recognized that an F.B.I. agent warned of it in a public speech. But that
same year, a strategy for tightening airline security, proposed by a vice-
presidential panel, was largely ignored.

In 2000, after an Algerian was caught coming into the country with
explosives, a secret White House review recommended a crackdown on
"potential sleeper cells in the United States." That review warned that
"the threat of attack remains high" and laid out a plan for fighting
terrorism. But most of that plan remained undone.

Last spring, when new threats surfaced, the Bush administration devised
a new strategy, which officials said included a striking departure from
previous policy  an extensive C.I.A. program to arm the Northern Alliance
and other anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan. That new proposal had wound
its way to the desk of the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice,
and was ready to be delivered to the president for final approval on
Monday, Sept. 10.

The government's fight against terrorism always seemed to fall
short.

The Sept. 11 attack "was a systematic failure of the way this country
protects itself," said James Woolsey, a former director of central
intelligence. "It's aviation security delegated to the airlines, who did a
lousy job. It's a fighter aircraft deployment failure. It's a foreign
intelligence collection failure. It's a domestic detection failure. It's a
visa and immigration policy failure."

The Clinton administration intensified efforts against Al Qaeda after
two United States Embassies in Africa were bombed in 1998. But by then,
the terror network had gone global  "Al Qaeda became Starbucks," said Charles Duelfer, a former State
Department official  with cells across Europe, Africa and beyond.

Even so, according to the interviews and documents, the government
response to terrorism remained measured, even halting, reflecting the
competing interests and judgments involved in fighting an ill-defined
foe.

The main weapon in President Clinton's campaign to kill Mr. bin Laden
and his lieutenants was cruise missiles, which are fired from thousands of
miles away. While that made it difficult to hit Mr. bin Laden as he moved
around Afghanistan, the president was reluctant to put American lives at
risk.

But a basic problem throughout the fight against terrorism has been the
lack of inside information. The C.I.A. was surprised repeatedly by Mr. bin
Laden, not so much because it failed to pay attention, but because it
lacked sources inside Al Qaeda. There were no precise warnings of
impending attacks, and the C.I.A. could not provide an exact location for
Mr. bin Laden, which was essential to the objective of killing him.

At the F.B.I., it was not until last year that all field offices were
ordered to get engaged in the war on terrorism and develop sources. Inside
the bureau, the seminars and other activities that accompanied these
orders were nicknamed "Terrorism for Dummies," a stark acknowledgment of
how far the agency had not come in the seven years since the first trade
center attack.

"I get upset when I hear complaints from Congress that the F.B.I. is
not sharing its intelligence," said a former senior law enforcement
official in the Clinton and Bush administrations. "The problem is that
there isn't any to share. There is very little. And the stuff we can share
is not worth sharing."

Officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central
Intelligence Agency said that they had some success in foiling Al Qaeda
plots, but that the structure of the group made it difficult to penetrate.
"It is understandable, but unrealistic, especially given our authorities
and resources, to expect us to be perfect," said Bill Harlow, a C.I.A.
spokesman.

The reasons the government was not more single-minded in attacking Al
Qaeda will be examined exhaustively and from every angle by Congress and
others in the years ahead.

In an era of opulence and invincibility, the threat of terrorism never
took root as a dominant political issue. Mr. bin Laden's boldest attack on
American property before Sept. 11  the embassy bombings  came in the
same summer that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was engulfing President
Clinton. A full fight against terrorism might have meant the sacrifice of
money, individual liberties and, perhaps, lives  and even then without
any guarantee of success.

Mr. Clarke, until recently the White House director of
counterterrorism, warned of the threat for years and reached this
conclusion: "Democracies don't prepare well for things that have never
happened before."

The First WarningA Horrible Surprise At the
Trade Center

On Feb. 26, 1993  a month after Bill Clinton
took office, having vowed to focus on strengthening the domestic economy
"like a laser"  the World Trade Center was bombed by Islamic extremists
operating from Brooklyn and New Jersey. Six people were killed, and
hundreds injured.

Today, American experts see that attack as the first of many missed
warnings. "In retrospect, the wake-up call should have been the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing," said Michael Sheehan, counterterrorism coordinator
at the State Department in the last years of the Clinton presidency.

The implications of the F.B.I.'s investigation were disturbingly clear:
A dangerous phenomenon had taken root. Young Muslims who had fought with
the Afghan rebels against the Soviet Union in the 1980's had taken their
jihad to American shores.

The F.B.I. was "caught almost totally unaware that these guys were in
here," recalled Robert M. Blitzer, a former senior counterterrorism
official in the bureau's headquarters. "It was alarming to us that these
guys had been coming and going since 1985 and we didn't know."

One of the names that surfaced in the bombing case was that of a Saudi
exile named Osama bin Laden, F.B.I. officials say. Mr. bin Laden, they
learned, was financing the Office of Services, a Pakistan-based group
involved in organizing the new jihad. And it turned out that the
mastermind of the trade center attack, Ramzi Yousef, had stayed for
several months in a Pakistani guest house supported by Mr. bin Laden.

But if the first World Trade Center bombing raised the consciousness of
some at the F.B.I., it had little lasting resonance for the White House.
Mr. Clinton, who would prove gifted at leading the nation through
sorrowful occasions, never visited the site. Congress tightened
immigration laws, but the concern about porous borders quickly dissipated
and the new rules were never put in effect.

Leon E. Panetta, the former congressman who was budget director and
later chief of staff during Mr. Clinton's first term, said senior aides
viewed terrorism as just one of many pressing global problems.

"Clinton was aware of the threat and sometimes he would mention it,"
Mr. Panetta said. But the "big issues" in the president's first term, he
said, were "Russia, Eastern bloc, Middle East peace, human rights, rogue
nations and then terrorism."

When it came to terrorism, Clinton administration officials continued
the policy of their predecessors, who had viewed it primarily as a crime
to be solved and prosecuted by law enforcement agencies. That approach,
which called for grand jury indictments, created its own problems.

The trade center investigation produced promising leads that pointed
overseas. But Mr. Woolsey said in an interview that this material was not
shared with the C.I.A. because of rules governing grand jury secrecy.

The C.I.A. faced its own obstacles, former agency officials say. In the
wake of the Soviet Union's withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the agency
virtually abandoned the region, leaving it with few sources of information
about the rising radical threat.

Looking back, George Stephanopoulos, the president's adviser for policy
and strategy in his first term, said he believed the 1993 attack did not
gain more attention because, in the end, it "wasn't a successful bombing."

He added: "It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff
meeting and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against
terrorism?"

Two years later, however, terrorism moved to the forefront of the
national agenda when a truck bomb tore into the Alfred P. Murrah Federal
Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people.

President Clinton visited Oklahoma City for a memorial service,
signaling the political import of the event. "We're going to have to be
very, very tough in dealing with this," he declared in an interview.

Mr. Panetta said that plans to reorganize the government's
counterterrorism efforts were quickly revived. Senior officials recognized
that the United States remained vulnerable to terrorism. The bombing
proved to be the work of two Americans, both former soldiers, but if
Oklahoma City could be hit, an attack by terrorists of any stripe could
"happen at the White House," Mr. Panetta said.

Two months after the bombing, Mr. Clinton ordered the government to
intensify the fight against terrorism. The order did not give agencies
involved in the fight more money, nor did it end the bureaucratic turf
battles among them.

But it did put Mr. bin Laden, who had set up operations in Sudan after
leaving Afghanistan in 1991, front and center.

Diplomacy and PoliticsA Growing Effort Against
bin Laden

As Mr. Clinton prepared his re-election bid in 1996, the administration
made several crucial decisions. Recognizing the growing significance of
Mr. bin Laden, the C.I.A. created a virtual station, code-named Alex, to
track his activities around the world.

In the Middle East, American diplomats pressed the hard-line Islamic
regime of Sudan to expel Mr. bin Laden, even if that pushed him back into
Afghanistan.

To build support for this effort among Middle Eastern governments, the
State Department circulated a dossier that accused Mr. bin Laden of
financing radical Islamic causes around the world.

The document implicated him in several attacks on Americans, including
the 1992 bombing of a hotel in Aden, Yemen, where American troops had
stayed on their way to Somalia. It also said Mr. bin Laden's associates
had trained the Somalis who killed 18 American servicemen in Mogadishu in
1993.

Sudanese officials met with their C.I.A. and State Department
counterparts and signaled that they might turn Mr. bin Laden over to
another country. Saudi Arabia and Egypt were possibilities.

State Department and C.I.A. officials urged both Egypt and Saudi Arabia
to accept him, according to former Clinton officials. "But both were
afraid of the domestic reaction and refused," one recalled.

Critics of the administration's effort said this was an early missed
opportunity to destroy Al Qaeda. Mr. Clinton himself would have had to
lean hard on the Saudi and Egyptian governments. The White House believed
no amount of pressure would change the outcome, and Mr. Clinton risked
spending valuable capital on a losing cause. "We were not about to have
the president make a call and be told no," one official explained.

Sudan obliquely hinted that it might turn Mr. bin Laden over to the
United States, a former official said. But the Justice Department reviewed
the case and concluded in the spring of 1996 that it did not have enough
evidence to charge him with the attacks on American troops in Yemen and
Somalia.

In May 1996, Sudan expelled Mr. bin Laden, confiscating some of his
substantial fortune. He moved his organization to Afghanistan, just as an
obscure group known as the Taliban was taking control of the country.

Clinton administration officials counted it as a positive step. Mr. bin
Laden was on the run, deprived of the tacit state sponsorship he had
enjoyed in Sudan.

"He lost his base and momentum," said Samuel R. Berger, Mr. Clinton's
national security adviser in his second term.

In July 1996, shortly after Mr. bin Laden left Sudan, Mr. Clinton met
at the White House with Dick Morris, his political adviser, to hone themes
for his re-election campaign.

The previous month, a suicide bomber had detonated a truck bomb at a
military barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American servicemen. Days
later, T.W.A. Flight 800 had exploded off Long Island, leaving 230 people
dead in a crash that was immediately viewed as terrorism.

Mr. Morris said he had devised an attack advertisement of the sort that
Senator Bob Dole, the Republican candidate, might use against Mr. Clinton
and had shown it to a sampling of voters. Seven percent of those who saw
it said they would switch from Mr. Clinton to Mr. Dole.

"Out of control. Two airline disasters. One linked to terrorism," the
advertisement said. "F.A.A. asleep at the switch. Terror in Saudi Arabia."
Mr. Morris said he told Mr. Clinton that he could neutralize such a line
of attack by adopting tougher policies on terrorism and airport security.
He said his polls had found support for tightening security and
confronting terrorists. Voters favored military action against suspected
terrorist installations in other countries. They backed a federal takeover
of airport screening and even supported deployment of the military inside
the United States to fight terrorism.

Mr. Morris said he tried and failed to persuade the president to
undertake a broader war on terrorism.

Mr. Clinton declined repeated requests for an interview, but a
spokeswoman, Julia Payne, said: "Terrorism was always a top priority in
the Clinton administration. The president chose to get his foreign policy
advice from the likes of Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright and not Dick
Morris."

On July 25, Mr. Clinton announced that he had put Vice President Al
Gore at the head of a commission on aviation safety and security. Within
weeks, the panel had drafted more than two dozen recommendations. Its
final report, in February 1997, added dozens more.

Among the most important, commission members said, was a proposal that
the F.B.I. and C.I.A. share information about suspected terrorists for the
databases maintained by each airline. If a suspected terrorist bought a
ticket, both the airline and the government would find out.

Progress was slow, particularly after federal investigators determined
that the crash of T.W.A. Flight 800 resulted from a mechanical flaw, not
terrorism. The commission's recommendation languished  until Sept. 11,
when two people already identified by the government as suspected
terrorists boarded separate American Airlines flights from Boston using
their own names.

That morning, no alarms went off. The system proposed by the Gore
commission was still not in place. The government is now moving to share
more information with the airlines about suspected terrorists.

"Unfortunately, it takes a dramatic event to focus the government's and
public's attention, especially on an issue as amorphous as terrorism,"
said Gerry Kauvar, staff director of the commission and now a senior
policy analyst at the RAND Corporation.

Focusing on Al QaedaA Clearer Picture, A
Disjointed Fight

As Mr. Clinton began his second term, American intelligence agencies
were assembling a clearer picture of the threat posed by Mr. bin Laden and
Al Qaeda, which was making substantial headway in Afghanistan.

A few months earlier, the first significant defector from Al Qaeda had
walked into an American Embassy in Africa and provided a detailed account
of the organization's operations and ultimate objectives.

The defector, Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, told American officials that Mr. bin
Laden had taken aim at the United States and other Western governments,
broadening his initial goal of overthrowing Saudi Arabia and other
"infidel" Middle Eastern governments.

He said that Al Qaeda was trying to buy a nuclear bomb and other
unconventional weapons. Mr. bin Laden was also trying to form an
anti-American terrorist front that would unite radical groups. But Mr.
Fadl's statements were not widely circulated within the government. A
senior official said their significance was not fully understood by Mr.
Clinton's top advisers until his public testimony in 2000.

The war against Al Qaeda remained disjointed. While the State
Department listed Mr. bin Laden as a financier of terror in its 1996
survey of terrorism, Al Qaeda was not included on the list of terrorist
organizations subject to various sanctions released by the United States
in 1997.

The F.B.I.'s counterterrorism experts, who were privy to Mr. Fadl's
debriefings, were growing increasingly concerned about Islamic terrorism.
"Almost all of the groups today, if they chose, have the ability to strike
us in the United States," John P. O'Neill, a senior F.B.I. official
involved in counterterrorism, warned in a June 1997 speech.

The task, Mr. O'Neill said, was to "nick away" at terrorists' ability
to operate in the United States. (Mr. O'Neill left the F.B.I. this year
for a job as chief of security at the World Trade Center, where he died on
Sept. 11.)

As Mr. O'Neill spoke in Chicago, the F.B.I. and C.I.A. was homing in on
a Qaeda cell in Nairobi, Kenya.

The National Security Agency began eavesdropping on telephone lines
used by Al Qaeda members in the country. On several occasions, calls to
Mr. bin Laden's satellite phone in Afghanistan were overheard. The F.B.I.
and C.I.A. searched a house in Kenya, seizing a computer and questioning
Wadih El-Hage, an American citizen working as Mr. bin Laden's personal
secretary.

American officials counted the operations as a success and believed
they had disrupted a potentially dangerous terrorist cell. They were
proved wrong on Aug. 7, 1998, when truck bombs were detonated outside the
United States embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing
224 people, including 12 Americans, and injuring more than 5,000.

Stunned by the plot's ambition and precision, Mr. Clinton vowed to
punish the perpetrators, who were quickly identified as Al Qaeda
adherents. "No matter how long it takes or where it takes us," the
president said, "we will pursue terrorists until the cases are solved and
justice is done."

The political calculus, however, had changed markedly since the
president's triumph in the fall of 1996, and Mr. Clinton was in no
position to mount a sustained war against terrorism.

His administration was weighed down by a scandal over his relationship
with a White House intern. Mr. Clinton was about to acknowledge to a grand
jury that his public and private denials of the affair had been
misleading. Republicans depicted every foreign policy decision as an
attempt to distract voters.

Thirteen days after the embassy bombings, President Clinton nonetheless
ordered cruise missile strikes on a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and a
pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that officials said was linked to Mr. bin
Laden and chemical weapons.

But the volley of cruise missiles proved a setback for American
counterterrorism efforts. The C.I.A. had been told that Mr. bin Laden and
his entourage were meeting at the camp, but the missiles struck just a few
hours after he left. And the owner of the pharmaceutical factory came
forward to claim that it had nothing to do with chemical weapons, raising
questions about whether the Sudan strike had been in error.

The Clinton administration stood by its actions, but several former
officials said the criticism had an effect on the pursuit of Al Qaeda: Mr.
Clinton became even more cautious about using force against terrorists.

Unfortunately, the quarry was becoming more dangerous. In the two years
since leaving Sudan, Mr. bin Laden had built a formidable base in
Afghanistan. He lavished millions of dollars on the impoverished Taliban
regime and in exchange was allowed to operate a network of training camps
that attracted Islamic militants from all over the world. In early 1998,
just as he declared war on Americans everywhere in the world, he cemented
an alliance with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a ruthless and effective group
whose leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was known for his operational skills.

The Battle IntensifiesStruggling to Track
'Enemy No. 1'

In the years after the embassy bombings, the Clinton administration
significantly stepped up its efforts to destroy Al Qaeda, tracking its
finances, plotting military strikes to wipe out its leadership and
prosecuting its members for the bombings and other crimes. "From August
1998, bin Laden was Enemy No. 1," Mr. Berger said.

The campaign had the support of President Clinton and his senior aides.
But former administration officials acknowledge that it never became the
government's top priority.

When it came to Pakistan, for example, American diplomats continued to
weigh the war on terrorism against other pressing issues, including the
need to enlist Islamabad's help in averting a nuclear exchange with
India.

Similarly, a proposal to vastly enhance the Treasury Department's
ability to track global flows of terrorist money languished until after
Sept. 11. And American officials were reluctant to press the oil-rich
Saudis to crack down on charities linked to radical causes.

Still, the fight against Al Qaeda gained new, high-level attention
after the embassy attacks, present and former officials say. Between 1998
and 2000, the "Small Group" of the Cabinet-rank principals involved in
national security met almost every week on terrorism, and the
Counterterrorism Security Group, led by Mr. Clarke, met two or three times
a week, officials said.

The United States disrupted some Qaeda cells, and persuaded friendly
intelligence services to arrange the arrest and transfer of Al Qaeda
members without formal extradition or legal proceedings. Dozens were
quietly sent to Egypt and other countries to stand trial.

President Clinton also ordered a more aggressive program of covert
action, signing an intelligence order that allowed him to use lethal force
against Mr. bin Laden. Later, this was expanded to include as many as a
dozen of his top lieutenants, officials said.

On at least four occasions, Mr. Clinton sent the C.I.A. a secret
"memorandum of notification," authorizing the government to kill or
capture Mr. bin Laden and, later, other senior operatives. The C.I.A. then
briefed members of Congress about those plans.

The C.I.A. redoubled its efforts to track Mr. bin Laden's movements,
stationing submarines in the Indian Ocean to await the president's launch
order. To hit Mr. bin Laden, the military said it needed to know where he
would be 6 to 10 hours later  enough time to review the decision in
Washington and program the cruise missiles.

That search proved frustrating. Officials said the C.I.A. did have some
spies within Afghanistan. On at least three occasions between 1998 and
2000, the C.I.A. told the White House it had learned where Mr. bin Laden
was and where he might soon be.

Each time, Mr. Clinton approved the strike. Each time, George Tenet,
the director of central intelligence, called the president to say that the
information was not reliable enough to be used in an attack, a former
senior Clinton administration official said.

In late 1998, according to former officials, intelligence agents
reported that Abu Hafs, a Mauritanian and an important figure in Al Qaeda,
was staying in Room 13 at the Dana Hotel in Khartoum.

With such specific information in hand, White House officials wanted
Abu Hafs either killed or, preferably, captured and transferred out of
Sudan to a friendly state where he could be interrogated, the former
officials said.

The agency initially questioned whether it could accomplish such a
mission in a hostile, risky environment like Sudan, putting it in the "too
hard to do box," one former official said. An intelligence official
disputed this account, saying the C.I.A. made "a full-tilt effort in a
very dangerous environment."

Eventually, the C.I.A. enlisted another government to help seize Abu
Hafs, a former official said, but by then it was too late. The target had
disappeared.

Officials said the White House pushed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to
develop plans for a commando raid to capture or kill Mr. bin Laden. But
the chairman, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, and other senior Pentagon officers
told Mr. Clinton's top national security aides that they would need to
know Mr. bin Laden's whereabouts 12 to 24 hours in advance.

Pentagon planners also considered a White House request to send a
hunter team of commandos, small enough to avoid detection, the officer
said. General Shelton discounted this option as naοve, the officer said.

White House officials were frustrated that the Pentagon could not
produce plans that involved a modest number of troops. Military planners
insisted that an attack on Al Qaeda required thousands of troops invading
Afghanistan. "When you said this is what it would take, no one was
interested," a senior officer said.

A former administration official recently defended the decision not to
employ a commando strike. "It would have been an assault without the kind
of war we've seen over the last three months to support it," the official
said. "And it would have been very unlikely to succeed."

Clinton administration officials also began trying to choke off Al
Qaeda's financial network. Shortly after the embassy bombings, the United
States began threatening states and financial institutions with sanctions
if they failed to cut off assistance to those who did business with Al
Qaeda and the Taliban.

In 1999 and early 2000, some $255 million of Taliban-controlled assets
was blocked in United States accounts, according to William F. Wechsler, a
former White House official.

Mr. Wechsler said the search for Al Qaeda's assets was often stymied by
poor cooperation from Middle Eastern and South Asian states.

The United States, too, he added, had problems. "Few intelligence
officials who understand the nuances of the global banking system" were
fluent in Arabic. While the C.I.A. had done a "reasonably good job"
analyzing Al Qaeda, he wrote, it was "poor" at developing sources within
Mr. bin Laden's financial network. The F.B.I., he argued, had similar
shortcomings.

Intelligence officials said the C.I.A. had amassed considerable detail
about the group's finances, and that information was used in the broad
efforts to freeze its accounts after Sept. 11.

At the State Department, officials reacted sharply to the assault on
the embassies. Michael Sheehan, the department's former counterterrorism
coordinator, said that after the bombings, Secretary of State Madeleine K.
Albright met with her embassy security director every morning and became
increasingly focused on efforts to protect her employees and
installations.

But to Mr. Sheehan, the response was inadequate. He believed that
terrorism could be contained only if Washington devised a "comprehensive
political strategy to pressure Pakistan and other neighbors and allies
into isolating not only Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but the Taliban and
others who provide them sanctuary," he said, and that did not happen.
There were competing priorities. "Our reaction was responsive, almost
never proactive," he said.

'We Were Flying Blind'An Arrest, a Review And
New Obstacles

The arrest of Ahmed Ressam was the clearest sign that Osama bin Laden
was trying to bring the jihad to the United States.

Mr. Ressam was arrested when he tried to enter the United States in
Port Angeles, Wash., on Dec. 14, 1999. Inside his rental car, agents found
130 pounds of bomb-making chemicals and detonator components.

His arrest helped reveal what intelligence officials later concluded
was a Qaeda plot to unleash attacks during the millennium celebrations,
aimed at an American ship in Yemen, tourist sites and a hotel in Jordan,
and unknown targets in the United States.

"That was a wake-up call," a senior law enforcement officer said, "not
for law enforcement and intelligence, but for policy makers." Just as the
embassy bombings had exposed the threat of Al Qaeda overseas, the
millennium plot revealed gaping vulnerabilities at home.

"If you understood Al Qaeda, you knew something was going to happen,"
said Robert M. Bryant, who was the deputy director of the F.B.I. when he
retired in 1999. "You knew they were going to hit us, but you didn't know
where. It just made me sick on Sept. 11. I cried when those towers came
down."

A White House review of American defenses in March 2000 found
significant shortcomings in nearly a decade of government efforts to
improve defenses against terrorists at home. The F.B.I. and the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, it said, should begin "high tempo,
ongoing operations to arrest, detain and deport potential sleeper cells in
the United States."

The review called for the government to greatly expand its
antiterrorism efforts inside the United States, creating an additional
dozen joint federal-local task forces like the one that had been set up in
New York.

The review identified particular weaknesses in the nation's immigration
controls, officials said. The government remained unable to track
foreigners in the United States on student visas, despite a 1996 law
passed after the first World Trade Center bombing that required it to do
so.

In June 2000, after the millennium plot was revealed, the National
Commission on Terrorism recommended that the immigration service set up a
system to keep tabs on foreign students. Academic institutions opposed the
recommendation, fearing that a strict reporting requirement might alienate
prospective foreign students, according to government officials. Nothing
changed.

As the commission was completing its work, the Sept. 11 hijackers began
entering the United States. One of the 19 hijackers, Hani Hanjour, who had
traveled on a student visa, failed to show up for school and remained in
the country illegally.

The F.B.I. had some problems of its own. It had no intelligence warning
of an attack on Los Angeles International Airport, which investigators
eventually learned was Mr. Ressam's intended target.

Beginning in 1997, senior officials at the bureau had begun to rethink
their approach to terrorism, viewing it now as a crime to be prevented
rather than solved. But it was the millennium plot that revealed how ill
equipped the bureau was to radically shift its culture, former officials
say.

It lacked informers within terrorist groups. It did not have the
computer and analytical capacity for integrating disparate pieces of
information.

"We did not have any actionable intelligence," one senior official
said. "We were flying blind."

In March 2000, Dale L. Watson, the F.B.I.'s assistant director for
counterterrorism, started a series of seminars with agents who headed the
bureau's 56 field offices. Each field office was required to establish a
joint terrorism task force with local police departments, modeled after
the arrangement begun in New York in the mid-1980's. Field office chiefs
were also told to hire more Arabic translators and develop better sources
of information.

Mr. Watson said that the meetings were a centerpiece of efforts to
shore up the bureau's counterterrorism work that had begun several years
earlier. The meetings, he said, were "designed to bring every office, no
matter how small, to the same top terrorism capacities resident in our
larger offices like New York."

The F.B.I. renewed its push on Capitol Hill for money to create a
computer system that would allow various field offices to share and
analyze information collected by agents. Until late last year, Congress
had refused to pay for the project.

Without the analytical aid of a computer system, Mr. Bryant said, the
bureau's counterterrorism program would be hobbled, particularly if the
goal was to avert a crime. "We didn't know what we had," he said. "We
didn't know what we knew."

Overseas, the Clinton administration searched for new ways to obtain
the intelligence needed to attack Mr. bin Laden. In September 2000, an
unarmed, unmanned spy plane called the Predator flew test flights over
Afghanistan, providing what several administration officials called
incomparably detailed real-time video and photographs of the movements of
what appeared to be Mr. bin Laden and his aides.

The White House pressed ahead with a program to arm the Predator with a
missile, but the effort was slowed by bureaucratic infighting between the
Pentagon and the C.I.A. over who would pay for the craft and who would
have ultimate authority over its use. The dispute, officials said, was not
resolved until after Sept. 11.

On Oct. 12, an explosive-laden dinghy piloted by two suicide bombers
exploded next to the American destroyer Cole in Yemen, killing 17 sailors.
Intelligence analysts linked the bombing to Al Qaeda, but at a series of
Cabinet-level meetings, Mr. Tenet of the C.I.A. and senior F.B.I.
officials said the case was not conclusive.

Mr. Clarke, the White House counterterrorism director, had no doubts
about whom to punish. In late October, officials said, he put on the table
an idea he had been pushing for some time: bombing Mr. bin Laden's largest
training camps in Afghanistan.

With the administration locked in a fevered effort to broker a peace
settlement in Israel, an election imminent and the two- term Clinton
administration coming to a close, the recommendation went nowhere.
Terrorism was not raised as an issue by either Vice President Al Gore or
George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign.

In October 2000, the administration took another shot at killing Mr.
bin Laden. When Mr. Berger called the president to tell him the effort had
failed, he recalled, Mr. Clinton cursed. "Just keep trying," he said.

The New TeamSeeing the Threat But Moving
Slowly

As he prepared to leave office last January, Mr. Berger met with his
successor, Condoleezza Rice, and gave her a warning.

According to both of them, he said that terrorism  and particularly
Mr. bin Laden's brand of it  would consume far more of her time than she
had ever imagined.

A month later, with the administration still getting organized, Mr.
Tenet, whom President Bush had asked to stay on at the C.I.A., warned the
Senate Intelligence Committee that Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda remained
"the most immediate and serious threat" to security. But until Sept. 11,
the people at the top levels of the Bush administration may, if anything,
have been less preoccupied by terrorism than the Clinton aides.

At the C.I.A., according to former Clinton administration officials,
Mr. Tenet's actions did not match his words. For example, one intelligence
official said, the C.I.A. station in Pakistan remained understaffed and
underfinanced, though the C.I.A. denied that.

In March, the White House's Counterterrorism Security Group began
drafting its own strategy for combating Al Qaeda. Mr. Clarke was still
nominally in charge, but Bush aides were on the way to approving Mr.
Clarke's recommendation that his group be divided into several new
offices.

Mr. Bush's principals did not formally meet to discuss terrorism in
late spring when intercepts from Afghanistan warned that Al Qaeda was
planning to attack an American target in late June or perhaps over the
July 4 holiday.

They did not meet even after intelligence analysts overheard
conversations from a Qaeda cell in Milan suggesting that Mr. bin Laden's
agents might be plotting to kill Mr. Bush at the European summit meeting
in Genoa, Italy, in late July.

Administration officials say the president was concerned about the
growing threat and frustrated by the halfhearted efforts to thwart Al
Qaeda. In July, Ms. Rice said, Mr. Bush likened the response to the Qaeda
threat to "swatting at flies." He said he wanted a plan to "bring this guy
down."

The administration's draft plan for fighting Al Qaeda included a $200
million C.I.A. program that, among other things, would arm the Taliban's
enemies. Clinton administration officials had refused to provide
significant money and arms to the Northern Alliance, which was composed
mostly of ethnic minorities. Officials feared that large-scale support for
the rebels would involve the United States too deeply in a civil war and
anger Pakistan.

President Bush's national security advisers approved the plan on Sept.
4, a senior administration official said, and it was to be presented to
the president on Sept. 10. (However, the leader of the Northern Alliance
was assassinated by Qaeda agents on Sept. 9.) Mr. Bush was traveling on
Sept. 10 and did not receive it.

The next day his senior national security aides gathered shortly before
9 a.m. for a staff meeting. At roughly the same moment, a hijacked
Boeing 767 was plowing into the north tower
of the World Trade Center.

This article was reported by Judith Miller, Jeff Gerth and Don
Van Natta Jr. and written by Ms. Miller.